Category: Recommendations

Why I write

Published on July 16th, 2009

I was never much of a fan of English when I was growing up.

Well, I take that back. As a child, my mother read me books, and I was a reading-level ahead of most of my classmates. In elementary school, they gave test in every English class to see what kind of textbook to give to each student, and I was always one of the few using the textbook a grade-level ahead. Also at this point in my life, I was obsessed with R.L. Stine and read Goosebump novels whenever I had free time, including my lunch periods.

But somehow when I got to middle school I lost a passion for reading. I don’t remember liking books at that stage of my life at all actually, and I have no idea why. After my English grades began to slip, I came to the conclusion that I hated English, and acted as such. Continue reading “Why I write”

Introducing Ubiquity

Published on September 4th, 2008

As described on Mozilla Wiki, Ubiquity is “an experimental Firefox extension that gives you a powerful new way to interact with the Web.” Essentially, it allows users to do such things as highlight text and then type in “email this to Jon” and it brings up your email client with the selected text in the body of the email and Jon’s email already entered.

I’m going to give a full review at some point, but in the mean time, I wanted to post this video which gives a more in depth description of the extension. Continue reading “Introducing Ubiquity”

Three iPhone App Reviews

Published on July 31st, 2008

I am an early adopter. That is, I actively seek and try out new products and experience before my friends. Later, I happily share my experiences with others in an attempt to persuade them to do or not do something. Being an early adopter, I usually end up paying more for products and having to deal with the technical issues that usually plague products when they are first released. This was the case with the first generation iPhone that I currently own. Continue reading “Three iPhone App Reviews”

Firefox 3

Published on June 19th, 2008

Download it.

I’m the kind of person that thinks going around and forcing people to upgrade there browser makes the world a better place. It does! Really. I strongly suggest that anyone who sees someone using Firefox 2 immediately update their browser to Firefox 3. And if you see anyone using any version of Internet Explorer, quickly get them using Firefox 3 before something bad happens. What bad could happen? I don’t think you want to know. Continue reading “Firefox 3”

Gamasutra

Published on May 2nd, 2008

Continuing with recommendations of sites that interest me, I want to talk about Gamasutra.

Aside from being a designer, I am also a writer. My ultimate goal, in fact, is to write story lines for video games, and I often read articles on the subject.

Recently, Gamasutra posted two articles about narration and subtext in games–two aspects of game design that I think are lacking at the moment. In one article, Bioshock co-creator Ken Levine discusses Bioshock’s narrative drive in an interview. In the first question, though, the author of the article links to a presentation he did at GDC (Game Developers Conference). Both I recommend reading if your a Bioshock fan or if your into game design.

Another article I recommending reading is titles Why More Games Need Subtext and essentially tries to convince the reader that games should be more than just “fun,” which is something I highly agree with.

Smashing Magazine

Published on April 27th, 2008

Smashing Magazine is a great resource that every designer should have bookmarked and in their RSS feed. They literally smash you with information. Often too much, in fact, for me to consume in one day. But then they smash you the next day, and the next.

Recently they did a post titled Inspirational Hyperreal Vector Artist and Images, and they are nothing short of amazing. I’ve dabbled in vector graphics, but these guys and girls make me want to master it.

I highly recommend checking the post out and subscribing to their RSS feed.